Review of Foundations of Pragmatics

International Journal of Language Studies Volume 7, Number 1, January 2013, pp. 175-184

Book Review Bublitz, W., & Norrick, N. R. (Eds.). (2011). Foundations of pragmatics. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. [710 pp: ISBN 978-3-11-021425-3 (hardcover)].

1. Introduction Foundations of Pragmatics is one of the nine volumes of the series of Handbooks of Pragmatics. The series contains nine self-contained volumes which provide a comprehensive overview of the entire field of pragmatics. The nine handbooks cover a variety of topics including patterns of linguistic actions, functions of language, types of inferences, principles of communication, frames of knowledge, attitude and belief, and principles of text and discourse. The handbooks follow two objectives. They cover theories, approaches, concepts and topics of pragmatics. They also follow a definite structure, which gives coherence to the field of pragmatics. Each volume pursues a particular aim. All the articles are state-of-the-art reviews and critical evaluations of the topics in the ongoing developments. As the opening volume in the series, Foundations of Pragmatics focuses on micro and macro units and operates with a wide conception of pragmatics. The volume deals with approaches “that are traditional and contemporary, linguistic and philosophical, social and cultural, text- and context-based, as well as diachronic and synchronic” (p. vi). It provides historical, conceptual, theoretical and methodological views based on which the other handbooks can be associated to each other and to the development of the field of pragmatics. 2. Summary of the Content Foundations of Pragmatics consists of five parts and covers 23 papers selected on different topics. The first section is called Conceptual Foundations and consists of four papers which cover the fundamental issues on Pragmatics. Chapter One written by Anita Fetzer, Pragmatics as a Linguistic Concept defines pragmatics as a linguistic concept and mentions that various attempts have been made to systematize the complex field of pragmatics. The author conceptualizes pragmatics as a perspective, which contains a general pragmatic perspective, a social perspective, a compositional perspective and a relational perspective. It also differentiates between linguistic pragmatics and general (or non-linguistic) pragmatics. She analyzes action and cooperation in

176 A. Chalak & H. Heidari Tabrizi

general pragmatics and discusses presupposition, common ground, context, and cooperation. In linguistic pragmatics, concepts such as speech act and implicature are analyzed. Fetzer believes that “linguistic pragmatics and general pragmatics share almost identical goals: general pragmatics examines pragmatic principles, mechanisms and universals in the context of action theory, rationality and intentionality, while linguistic pragmatics focuses on their instantiation in language and language use” (p. 44). Chapter Two, Micropragmatics and Macropragmatics, written by Piotr Cap defines micropragmatics as the pragmatics of utterance-based concepts such as speech acts, and macropragmatics as the pragmatics of discourse as well as text-based concepts such as topics, discourse markers. The author claims that micropragmatics and macropragmatics complete each other. The chapter deals with the concepts of deixis, presupposition, implicature and speech acts as the central concepts in the methodology of pragmatics and discusses these concepts from a micropragmatic and macropragmatic perspectives. The paper reviews locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary constituents of utterance force. It also shows how individual utterances can shape sequences to make a discourse or text. Pragmalinguistics and Sociopragmatics written by Sophia Marmaridou discusses the distinction between pragmalinguistics (dealing with forms, or what form to use to achieve an intended pragmatic effect) and sociopragmatics (dealing with pragmatic strategies, or when to use a particular pragmatic strategy), and claims that this distinction “seems to be at odds with the fact that the borderline between the two is often fuzzy, to the extent that they are often thought of as the two end points of a continuum” (p. 76). She reviews the borders between the two concepts from the perspective of Leech (1983) and Thomas (1983), discusses the distinction in a cross- linguistic and cross-cultural perspective, and examines their contribution to historical pragmatics and corpus linguistics. She describes that pragmalinguistics is the study of certain resources that a language provides for conveying illocutionary and interpersonal meaning, whereas sociopragmatics relates pragmatic meaning to other factors such as community’s social norms and rules, participants’ social distance, and appropriate behaviors. The author proposes the figure/ground schema and believes that the figure/ground relationship presents pragmalinguistics and sociopragmatics “distinct, but interacting, instances of perspectivisation” (p. 78). Chapter Four, Metapragmatics by Axel Hübler, focuses on metapragmatics as the study of explicit and implicit metacommunication. The chapter discusses topics of metacommunication, such as Grice’s maxims, Leech’s politeness principle, etc; it reviews the purposes of metacommunication comments such International Journal of Language Studies, 7(1), 175-184 177

as evaluation, defending, or questioning, target and the forms of realization. The chapter describes two aspects: (a) what linguists/experts observe about people’s act or interaction; and (b) what experts observe about their practice. Hübler believes that observing communication and describing/systematizing these observations are the viewpoints that are saved for the professional linguist, while theorizing the conditions and implications is open for both professional and ordinary conversationalists. The second section is dedicated to the Theoretical Foundations of Pragmatics. It starts with “The Rise of Pragmatics: A Historiographic Overview” by Wataru Koyama. While emphasizing on the newness of the field, the chapter traces linguistic pragmatics. It asks questions such as how, why, when and by whom the field of linguistic pragmatics has established. The author examines key concepts of linguistic pragmatics such as speech act, presupposition, implicature, context, function, and reference. The chapter presents a historiographic account and discusses that the linguistic pragmatics comes out of the Continental tradition not Anglo-American tradition. In Chapter Six, Semiotic Foundations of Pragmatics, Winfried Nöth connects pragmatics to its foundations in semiotics. He explains how the development of pragmatics was influenced by semiotics by focusing on the contributions of dominant characters such as Peirce, Morris and Carnap. According to their framework, pragmatics is one of the branches of semiotics. Main issues in pragmatics including “the questions concerning intention and purpose, meaning and reference, word and object, interpretation and communication, or the relationship between language and action, find fundamental answers in the writings of the founder of general semiotics and philosophical pragmatism (or pragmaticism)” (p. 11). The author also mentions that communication is a central issue of semiotics and introduces a communication model in linguistic pragmatics known as semiotic model. The model has six factors known as addresser, message, addressee, context, code, and contact and each of these factors is the contributing factor to a specific communicative function. Nikola Kompa and Georg Meggle in Pragmatics in Modern Philosophy of Language trace the origins of linguistic pragmatics in the Philosophy of Language in the works of Austin, Searle, Wittgenstein, Strawson, and Grice. They elaborate on two approaches to language and meaning: formal semantics and pragmatic semantics. In the first, “semantics is taken as given and the aim is to incorporate as many context-sensitive aspects of language as possible into that semantics”; in the second, “research is trying to spell out the semantics on a pragmatical (action-theoretical) basis itself” (p. 11). While presenting both paradigms of pragmatics, the authors mention the basic problems as well as the state of the art in this regard. 178 A. Chalak & H. Heidari Tabrizi

Saskia Daalder and Andreas Musolffin follow the roots of pragmatics in functional approaches to linguistics in Chapter Eight entitled Foundations of Pragmatics in Functional Linguistics. The authors trace the historical connections from Bühler, Jakobson, Hymes, to contemporary scholars in pragmatics and review that scholars such as Wegener, Bühler, Mathesius, and Jakobson were aware of the role of language in the life and culture of the people. These modernist theorists projected some pragmatic aspects on language which did not separate semantics from pragmatics. The authors conclude that although their works may lack systematic treatment of pragmatic facts, they still have potentials for different branches of pragmatics. Christine Domke and Werner Holly discuss two main questions in Chapter Nine entitled Foundations: Ethnomethodology and Erving Goffman. They ask what the Ethnomethodology is and what impact Ethnomethodology had on linguistic pragmatics. The authors outline Harold Garfinkel and his perspective on everyday life of the people by reviewing some early ethnomethodological investigations, and basic assumptions of ethnomethodology. The chapter reviews contrastive analysis and Erving Goffman’s perspective on interactions. It also compares the influence of conversation analysis and Goffman’s perspective on linguistic pragmatics. They conclude that although ethnomethodological conversation analysis is an independent school of thought, there is a gradual overlap between this school and other fields such as linguistics, anthropology, sociology. Heritage (2001) uses ethno-sciences to refer to this convergence. Maeve Cooke in Pragmatics in Habermas’ Critical Social Theory reviews the work of Habermas and its impact on development of pragmatics in Europe. She emphasizes that his contribution to the study of society by his formal pragmatics and critical theory is very important in contemporary sociology. The chapter also reviews the main features of Habermas’ formal pragmatics and its implications for social theory. Finally, it discusses three major lines of objection to Habermas’ use of formal pragmatics. The third section, Key Topics in Pragmatic Description, covers principal concepts of pragmatic description such as deixis, indexicality, reference and anaphora. Chapter Eleven entitled Deixis and Indexicality written by William F. Hanks reviews the research on deictic and indexicality form a pragmatic perspective. It covers indexicality in the semiotics of Peirce and Morris, and follows the development of it in different fields by linguists, sociolinguists, anthropologists, and covers topics such as deictic, and claims that deictic systems differ cross-linguistically. Chapter Twelve Reference and Anaphora written by Monika Schwarz-Friesel and Manfred Consten provides an overview of pragmatic research on how people use and understand reference and anaphora. While defining the International Journal of Language Studies, 7(1), 175-184 179

concepts of reference and anaphora, and their dynamic notions, the chapter reviews the past and present research studies on them, and emphasizes that these concepts are essentially pragmatic in nature because without considering pragmatic notions, it is not possible to describe them. Elena Collavin in Chapter Thirteen, Speech Acts, overviews the speech act theory, and Austin and Searle’s contribution to the field. The chapter covers some main topics such as performative utterances, theory of non-natural meaning, theory of speech acts, indirect speech acts. It also discusses Bach and Harnish’s (1979) classification of speech acts which focuses on speaker intention, and is based on Gricean classification. Collavin elaborates on the origin, development, and role of speech act in linguistics and evaluates on the notion of theory of speech act, its limitations, criticism, and application in pragmatics. She focuses on some aspects of speech acts such as conventionality, intentionality, and action. Chapter Fourteen Types of Inference: Entailment, Presupposition, and Implicature written by Yan Huang evaluates three fundamental types of inferences in semantics and pragmatics known as entailment, presupposition, and implicature by elaborating on their origin, development, and role in linguistics or other fields. The chapter examines each type of inference to include them in the category of semantics and pragmatics, and concludes that entailment is semantic in nature, presupposition is both semantic and pragmatic, and implicature can be semantic or pragmatic (conversational implicature is pragmatic but conventional implicature can be semantic or pragmatic). The author also compares entailment, presupposition, conversational, and conventional implicature in terms of defeasibility, negation, conventionality, and semantics versus pragmatics. The fourth major section titled The Place of Pragmatics in the Description of Discourse includes four chapters. This section opens with Chapter Fifteen, Pragmatics and Grammar by Arnulf Deppermann, discussing the role and relevance of grammar for pragmatics and the role and relevance of pragmatics for grammar. It also examines their integration into linguistic theory. The author elaborates theoretical positions, linguistic phenomena, empirical methods, and the relationship between pragmatics and grammar. He outlines functional approaches to grammar, functional grammar and functional discourse grammar, systemic-functional grammar, functional pragmatics, cognitive linguistics, construction grammar, usage-based approaches, and interactional linguistics. The chapter also examines the role of grammar for pragmatics by discussing some issues such as implicature, inference, information structure, repair, turn-construction/turn-taking, collaborative action, speech act, genre, gesture, politeness, power. 180 A. Chalak & H. Heidari Tabrizi

Chapter Sixteen Pragmatics and Semantics by John Saeed discusses the relationship between pragmatics and semantics in linguistic theories and focuses on issues, methods, areas, and contrasting views on the relationships. He mentions that there is a range of positions in the literature, for example, neo-Griceans see the relationship mutually dependent and orthogonal. Relevance theorists view the difference “in terms of a computational distinction between linguistic decoding and inference” (p. 484). Chomsky rejects the relationship, and cognitive semanticists perceive no distinction between pragmatics and semantics, and believe that the distinction between the two is artefactual. The chapter also discusses aspects of relevance theory as an example of contextualism and claims that aspects of relevance theory approach to lexical pragmatics are parallels to that of cognitive semantics. In Chapter Seventeen Pragmatics and Prosody: Prosody as Social Action, Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen explains the developments in the field of prosody and interaction so far, and reviews the dominant figures in pragmatics and the study of language use. She reviews what is called prosodic and what the status of prosody is. She also explains what the future will hold in store and what challenges are ahead by emphasizing on what counts as prosodic and what prosody’s place is in the analysis of multimodal interaction. The chapter, then, elaborates on prosodic resources for turn construction, action formation, floor management, multi-unit turn construction, turn continuation, sequence organization, repair, displaying and negotiating stance and alignment, and discusses the ways of dealing with them in the future. Jacob Mey discusses the relation between the language users in the context of literature in Chapter Eighteen entitled Pragmatics and Literature and states that the way language is used in the production of literary texts is called literary pragmatics. In other words, the focus of literary pragmatics is on the relationship between the authors, as the producers, and the readers, as the consumers of literary texts. The product is evaluated based on social conditions, and the roles of production and consumption. The author claims that the concept of voice is very important in the product. The producer uses a narrative and personal voice, and the consumer has a narrative voice. The chapter emphasizes that the social aspect of language use is s prominent both in literary and non-literary context, and discusses that the literary enterprise is a collaborative and interrelated effort. The author concludes that pragmatics is concerned with these issues: from which point of view we are addressed as hearers/readers, whose language is being spoken, and whose voices are being heard. Section Five, Methods and Tools, has five chapters. In the initial chapter, Approaching the Data of Pragmatics, Monika Bednarek focuses on the use of different data in pragmatics or related disciplines. The chapter discusses International Journal of Language Studies, 7(1), 175-184 181

types of data including attested as well as non-attested data. It also elaborates on elicited and non-elicited, and their subcategories such as interviews, verbal reports, DCT, ethnographic data, texts/discourse data. It covers both quantitative and qualitative methodologies including intuition, introspection to interviews, ethnographic field work, and corpus analysis. It compares various methodologies used in conversation analysis, politeness, and speech act theory. The author claims that “the use of different data and methodologies contributes variability to the field of pragmatics” (p. 551) and emphasizes on triangulation, or the use of a variety of methods, combination of quantitative and qualitative research, or what Dörnyei (2007) calls a mixed-methods approach. The author believes that reliability and validity of data is verified through triangulation (McNeill & Chatman, 2005). In Chapter Twenty, Experimental Pragmatics, Richard Breheny discusses that intentional pragmatics and understanding speaker’s meaning based on intentions and inferences in context have gained a lot of attention recently. He reviews recent studies in pragmatics, and surveys the foundations of pragmatics and experimental method. He claims that although inspection is the main method for collecting empirical data in formal linguistics, it has limitation in formal linguistics. His idea is based on Geurts and Pouscoulous’ (2009) claim that “no matter how consistent and robust an introspected inference may be, that doesn’t say anything about the frequency with which it is drawn in practice” (p. 4.18). Geurts and Pouscoulous believe that introspection on the availability of implicature creates some bias. They support the view that it is important to use methods other than introspection to establish the defaultness of a given pragmatic effect. The author reviews different studies on children, teenagers, and adults using the full range of methodologies including behavioristic and neuroscientific methods in the fields of psycholinguistics and developmental psychology. In Chapter Twenty-One, Corpus-Based Pragmatics I: Qualitative Studies, Gisle Andersen focuses on the use of computational methods for collecting and analyzing language data. As claimed by Hansen (1998), the author emphasizes that a corpus-based pragmatic analysis is “essentially inductive and interpretative” (p. 214) and is not reliable without analyst’s intuition. He describes (dis)advantages of the use of corpora. The chapter describes the body of pragmatics literature and argues in favor of application of corpora in pragmatics; that is, a corpus-based approach. It focuses on studies where corpora have been used successfully by covering topics such as discourse markers, prosody, listener activities and backchannels, and models of discourse structure. It also covers some contributors in corpus-based pragmatics by focusing on qualitative approaches to language data. He claims that in qualitative pragmatic studies, corpora play an important role. It has “provided a constantly growing pool of data, allowing researchers to test their 182 A. Chalak & H. Heidari Tabrizi

hypotheses about individual items and constructions, as well as practices and usage within particular groups, but also suggesting new avenues of research” (p. 17). The author concludes that it is better to supplement corpus-based pragmatics studies with a corpus-driven approach because it provides an encouraging viewpoint for future studies. In a companion chapter, entitled Corpus-Based Pragmatics II: Quantitative Studies, the author, Christoph Rühlemann advertises quantitative corpus- based research. He illustrates key quantitative corpus-based studies into pragmatic units by employing a selective approach. The chapter emphasizes that the relationship between pragmatics and corpus linguistics is a troubled relationship because corpora record just text and not meaning, and address the question of how context-sensitive corpora are. The chapter outlines characteristics of semantic prosody and presents it at the semantics/pragmatics interface, and concludes that semantic prosody helps to uncover irony and assist the study of persuasion. The chapter presents a relevance-theoretic study of Like as a pragmatic marker by reviewing Andersen’s (2001) corpus study and the five broad functions of like. Rühlemann also presents some quantitative studies on reference by reviewing two types of referring expressions, definite noun phrases, and deixis. By reviewing two studies on the speech act of complimenting and indirect speech act of suggesting, the chapter discusses that corpus research studies for speech acts are limited. The chapter concludes by looking to the future, and claiming that the use of multimodal corpora in future can play an important role in corpus pragmatic research studies. In final chapter, The Transcription of Face-to-Face Interaction, Roger J. Kreuz and Monica A. Riordan reflect the challenges in the representation of linguistic data. The chapter addresses transcription issues with regard to speech in different groups of children, aphasics, or cognitively impaired individuals. The authors review previously proposed coding schemes such as Jeffersonian Transcription System, Ochs system, London-Lund Corpus transcription, Tannen’s system, Discourse Transcription, HIAT, Gumperz and Berenz’s system, GAT, CHILDES and CHAT, Dressler and Kreuz’s system, and Powers’ coding system, by evaluating on their weaknesses and strengths. They discuss transcription of extralinguistic features, gestures, eye gaze, body posture, and make recommendations on how non-acoustic signals should be coded. They claim that a comprehensive transcription coding system can be helpful in different research studies. It can describe and study the multimodal aspects of conversational interaction, and facilitate interpretation of the results, but, at the moment, such a comprehensive transcription coding system does not exist. The chapter ends by emphasizing on Bird’s (2005) claim that although transcribing is a hard and thorough process, it can be enjoyable. International Journal of Language Studies, 7(1), 175-184 183

3. Concluding Remarks Handbooks of Pragmatics, consisting of nine volumes, provides a comprehensive overview of the field of pragmatics. Foundations of Pragmatics as the first volume of the series outlines the fundamental issues and trends in the study of pragmatics. As claimed by the authors, the decisions regarding the field, issues, and how they should be included and addressed, reflect the authors’ views of pragmatics and their expertise. The chapters represent extended definition of pragmatics as practiced today, offer state-of-the-art reviews of the topics, and provide critical evaluations of the future developments. What is important about Foundations of Pragmatics is that many educators, researchers and authors have contributed in this work. Therefore, variety of voices and topics are included in the edited collection. The book is recommended to all those who are interested in pragmatics and to those who wish to conduct research on the field.

Azizeh CHALAK, Islamic Azad University, Khorasgan Branch (IAUKB), Isfahan, Iran Hossein HEIDARI TABRIZI, Islamic Azad University, Khorasgan Branch (IAUKB), Isfahan, Iran

The Authors Azizeh Chalak (Email: azizeh_chalak [at] yahoo.com) is an assistant professor of TEFL at the English Department of Islamic Azad University, Khorasgan Branch (IAUKB), Isfahan, Iran. Her research interests include Discourse Analysis, Pragmatics, Sociolinguistics, Intercultural Communication, E-mail Communication, Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC), Genre Studies, and Methods of Teaching. Hossein Heidari Tabrizi (Email: heidaritabrizi [at] gmail.com) is an assistant professor of TEFL at the English Department of Islamic Azad University, Khorasgan Branch (IAUKB), Isfahan, Iran. His research interests include Translation studies, Discourse Analysis, Pragmatics, Sociolinguistics, and Intercultural Communication.

References Leech, G. (1983). Principles of pragmatics. London: Longman. Thomas, J. (1983). Cross-cultural pragmatic failure. Applied Linguistics, 4(2), 91–112. 184 A. Chalak & H. Heidari Tabrizi

Heritage, J. (2001). Ethno-sciences and their significance for conversation linguistics. In K. Brinker, G. Antos, W. Heinemann, & S. F. Sager (Eds.), Text- und Gesprächslinguistik. Linguistics of Text and Conversation, 2, (pp. 908-919). Berlin, de Gruyter. Bach, K., & Harnish, R. M. (1979). Linguistic communication and speech acts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Dörnyei, Z. (2007). Research methods in applied linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McNeill, P., & Chatman, S. (2005). Research methods. 3rd ed. London: Routledge. Geurts, P., & Pouscoulous, N. (2009). No scalar inferences under embedding. Semantics and Pragmatics, 2(4), 1–34. Hansen, M. M. (1998). The function of discourse particles. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Andersen, G. (2001). Pragmatic markers and sociolinguistic variation. A relevance-theoretic approach to the language of adolescents. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Bird, C. (2005). How I stopped dreading and learned to love transcription. Qualitative Inquiry, 11, 226–248.